


Hiccups and Eggs

by Fear



Category: Original Work
Genre: Breakfast, College, Diners, Drugs, Eggs, Hiccups, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Sad, Short, Short Story, main character is a bitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 01:20:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15183602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fear/pseuds/Fear
Summary: A short story I made for a class I took last semester. Idk if any of y'all still exist out there, but you might like this. Been messing around with first person present, so let me know what you think.Two college students have a conversation over breakfast, it goes downhill really quickly.





	Hiccups and Eggs

Let me say something really quick, and I think it might offend the entirety of the human race: I think that people romanticize their problems too much. Yeah, yeah— I know what you are thinking— but Wendy, I have crippling anxiety, I have OCD, I’m depressed. Oh Wendy, how hard it is for me. See look, my fish died, my dog died, my mom died. Yeah. Well. Let me say something else. I think people also romanticize death too much.

It isn’t something that walks with a hood or a scythe. It isn’t something complicated that dictates our lives and dictates how we live them— it is really just like catching the hiccups. One moment you are fine, and then you are gasping for breath, seeking out a glass of water to wash down the cruel simplicity of it all.

Death doesn’t play chess and meander over every move, it doesn’t look at the playing board of life and make a quick draw at it all— it just shakes the dice and drops them in this fantastical game of probability and chance that has no wayward meaning except that it might just happen that you are the one to catch the next bout of hiccups. And guess what, I couldn’t give a shit if you have the hiccups or not. It doesn’t make you special, so get on with the story.

Here we are. A diner. It’s like early 2018 and I’m especially bored because the TV is broken and my idiot friend Ethan is fucking late. Again.

While I wait for his librarian-ass to get here, I just slump over the table like a carcass, letting my hair go everywhere in this gargantuan display of exhaustion and fed-up-edness. I can smell my own breath with my mouth closed and the intensity of the cheap-college-vodka-hand-sanitizer-smell is only making my migraine worse. I grumble at the white shapes dotting my peripheral. You know, I think that God curses the loneliest of us with migraines just to keep us company in the corners of our eyes and in the back of our skulls, but it is hard for me to even think that a God exists out there. Not with how many butterflies have caused this many storms with their tiny wings, with their tiny choices. 

Outside an early-morning storm brews on the horizon, towers of indigo clouds climbing up the sky like they are trying to escape the thinning atmosphere. Too bad they are stuck down here with the rest of us. 

“Wendy.”

Ethan is standing over the table, but hunched over and collapsing in on himself like the guy was hiding from his own shadow or something. A scruff of dirty blonde hair sits on top of his equally dirty head, plagued with acne and freckles. 

“Wendy,” he repeats.

“Eh,” I respond.

He looks at me like how you would look at roadkill on the side of the road, and just because the kid is that weird, he chooses willingly to sit across from said roadkill, fiddling his fingers and nervously palming his arm.

I rearrange my carcass to get a better look at him. Typical hipster bullshit for his attire— the sleeves of his blue sweater all mangled from being pulled at too often and the bridge between his glasses uneven from repeatedly being glued back together. Ethan isn’t really the fighter type, but was still a revolutionary in his own right. Can’t keep his damn trap shut, can’t just be a bystander, always has to be fiercely loyal to his handful of friends. I don’t even get why he decided to befriend me. The stereotypical sad boy from a semi-broken family with a good heart, and me. Me. 

“Like what, what the hell do you want from me at 6:00 a.m. in the fucking morning?” He narrows his gray eyes. Outside the storm mutters.

“Eh.”

“I will kill you.”

Groaning, I force myself upright and glare at him. “I’m a terrible person.”

Ethan doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I know. Remember Colly Wilson? You peed in her shampoo bottle because the girl took the last piece of cornbread at Phoebe's party.”

“Yeah— but have you ever tasted Phoebe's cornbread?”

“Oh my god, Colly still doesn’t know.” Ethan runs his hands through his hair stressfully. “Do you know how long shampoo can last?!”

“Probably longer than a month.” I shrug and lean back as a waitress passes us. “Coffee, black.”

Ethan is still a spasm of a person but manages to convey that he wants a hot chocolate.

“Ethan, I mean that yeah, I’ve done some stuff—”

He cuts me off. “You slept with Jenny Dawson’s boyfriend a seasonal pass to Waterworld.”

“Okay, and it was also a bet but—”

“Jenny is a good person, Wendy. I see her at the soup kitchen every day.”

“Just because some whore hands out soup to hobos—”

“What about Rita Johnson?” Ethan stops fidgeting. “You and Monica duct taped her to a door and shaved her head.”

I furrow my brow and think for a second. “You know, come to think of it, I might have peed in her shampoo too.”

He angrily sighs. “What did Rita even do? She literally never hangs out with anyone— she just studies.”

“That bitch stole my wallet.”

“No, no— that was Teo Garrison.”

“She cheated off my Calc exam.”

“That was Brian Wu.”

“She—”

“You don’t even know.”

I fold my arms. “When the fuck did this turn into an intervention? I invited you here, Ethan.”

The waitress returns with the coffee and cocoa, giving us a glance before walking away— hips swaying and butt accentuated by the degrading green uniform they are all wearing.

“Yeah, you’re a terrible person,” Ethan hisses, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose before taking a sip.

“Got the fucking memo, geez.”

I just hold my coffee, enjoying the smell of cheap French press while my migraine continues to boil in my skull— just a hot stew of blinking lights and sharp sounds. Thunder somersaults in the clouds overhead as if in response— a silent glimpse of lightning briefly lights up the window, but honestly it might be my head.

“So. Then why’d you bring me here? Again— it’s 6:00 AM in the morning.”

I stare into the black of my coffee, and it peers back like a shark in the reefs— dead and unmoving, a predator that wasn’t even preying on me, just hunting, just an animal dying between my fingers. I glared back.

“Wendy.”

I look up from the coffee. “You know my uncle, Giovanni Marcello? Like, I lived with him and all after the divorce, right? The guy’s like a father to me, the only parent I really have, right?”

Ethan nods smugly. He has heard my story several times now— between drunk tears and late-night talk where the fatigue had torn down my guard. And now.

“Vanni, he took me in. Let me be part of his house, his family, his, uh, business.”

Ethan raises an eyebrow, confused. Yeah, I never told him all of it. Not until now, but there is no reason to keep secrets when life is just one big storm that always ends the same way for everyone. 

“Vanni would send me on errands sometimes. Do a drop here, a drop there—”

“Drop?”

I roll my eyes. “Ethan, I was a goddamn drug dealer in high school, what the hell else do you want me to say?” I pause to take a sip of coffee. “I once sold this one kid crack, and he overdosed the next day. It was all over the news.”

Ethan doesn’t say anything.

“Once, I was going to the DMV with Vanni, and instead we hit a guy with a car because he owed us money. I helped put the body in the trunk.”

“Geez…”

“Oh. He wasn’t even dead. We went to one of his pal’s apartments and they brought him to a storage locker. I just waited in the car but I could still hear everything. Everything. I was sixteen, man.”

Ethan doesn’t say anything.

“We dumped the body in a landfill. With all the others.” I set the coffee down and coil a strand of black hair around my finger, leaning back nonchalantly.

“Once I broke a kid’s rib for only paying half of what he owed me.”

Ethan is completely white washed now, like he doesn’t know if he wants to hug me or run away from me. Typical of Ethan, always playing devil’s advocate, picking apart people until he found what good there was, panning for purity even in the darkest of souls. I swear, if he could he would sit with fucking Adolf Hitler and talk feelings. I mean he was still friends with me, maybe one of two. Honestly I sort of get the vibe that he just likes being with the problematic cases because we distract him from himself. “W-why didn’t you just go back to— to your mom or dad or something?”

“Oh yeah, my heroin addict mom or my Ken-doll dad with his little 18-year-old hanging off his arm. Plus, I fucking hate Miami.” I pause. “Vanni is all I have. He’s not a good man but he’s a good...” I trail off. My migraine acts up. The loneliest of people. 

Ethan lowers his gaze. “So— then what? Do you still run errands for him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to be like him.”

“You don’t know?”

I let out a long sigh of irritation, my heart propagating and flipping over itself. “Yeah. I guess I do. Technically I’m the reason his business is even in Boston.”

“Wendy…”

“At the beginning of last semester, there was this one kid, Tyler. He bought crack off of me and never paid, right? After some alcohol and goo-goo eyes, I got the guy alone in a bedroom. Told him he had two options— pay us back in work or lose a finger.” I pause for dramatic effect. “It’s pretty hard to get through bone with just a Swiss army knife.”

Ethan has his brow all knotted up in sympathetic concern, over-rationalizing my problems. “Why don’t you just stop, you don’t owe anything to your uncle. I know you, you’re a bitch, sure— you are like Regina George on steroids, but, but, you’re decent. You’re a good friend, at least to me. God, you’re the only person that will even listen to me. My father doesn’t take my advice, my brother's out of control, I’m just trying to get my degree— and no one has ever, ever even bothered to ask me how I was doing, if I was okay, except for you. Wendy, you don’t owe this guy a thing.”

“I owe him everything, he saved me, Ethan.” I almost glare at him, but I doubt it came off all too intimidating, being that I felt a knot in my throat and pangs of flooding in my eyes. Ethan is a good friend. 

The waitress returns. Brushing it off, I stick a finger in the air and announce, “a plate of eggs for me, well done.”

She takes it down.

Ethan smiles crookedly. “I’m— uh, I’m okay.”

She leaves wordlessly.

His eyes roll back to me, sad pools of gray clouds, a kinked strand of blonde hair falling over his face. “People change. People can change. If you don’t want to be like your uncle, you don’t have to. That’s the great thing about being human, we make our own choices. We decide what we want to be.”

“I want to be better, I do. I want to be like Jenny Dawson or Rita Johnson, I do. But Jenny and Rita haven’t seen shit. They don’t have a reason not to be who they are, and I guess neither do I.”  
We sit quietly for a bit. The TV fixes itself and turns on. Saturday morning cartoons play mutely, just moving pictures of some distortion of a cat and a dog running around and doing something that I can’t really put words too. I resume my slumping position as the eggs come, Ethan just watching his own hands fidget over themselves, fleeting thoughts going through his head.

I poke at the over easy eggs like they are Monte Cristo, my head lofted on the side of the table and my hair sprawled over its surface. At this angle, I can’t even see the eggs, but just by prodding at the consistency, I know that I won’t like them. You see, I like my eggs overdone— browning at the edges and completely separated from the liquid phase. I like my eggs like how I like my friends and family— not seeping from the edges, not runny with their insides tumbling out every other second, but I keep ending up with those sorts of friends and that sort of family, and every time I come to this diner I keep ending up with over easy eggs.

“Do you remember when we went out to the lake last week?” I ask.

It was a trip that we took before midterms, just him and I out at a close-by reservoir up in the foothills. All we had were these paddle boards, but we went so far out and got lost so that when night fell, we were still stranded on the water and couldn’t find our way back to the docks.

“Do you remember all those stars?” I smile at him.

Ethan nods. “Yeah, I remember.” A light flickers across his face— this is a sacred memory.

“I told you, I’m sort of the only reason why Vanni’s even doing business in Boston, but there’s a lot of competition. People want to know the details, the locations, the numbers and all, right? According to Vanni, the damn Yakuza has been the worst.”

Ethan squints, confused.

“They’d do anything, at anyone’s expense. Even send some clueless kid just trying to make an extra buck on the side. Maybe he’s trying to feed his baby brother because his single father got laid off and is descending into alcoholism. Maybe he just didn’t know what else to do.”

“What’re you—”

“That night, under the stars and in the blackness of the water, I saw the tattoo on your leg. Wasn’t hidden well enough. Signature of the Yakuza. A dead giveaway, man.”

“Wendy—” Ethan’s gray eyes bundle up in fear and I stand, my heart still damning itself and tearing itself apart— pounding on the bars of the prison within my rib cage, rattling my soul.  


I reach into my purse, pulling out the Glock .40. A couple sitting next to us gasp.

“Ethan, question for ya— have you ever had the hiccups?” And I raise the gun, and I shoot. And the bridge between Ethan’s glasses finally break for good. Outside the storm passes, without even shedding a tear.

I have always thought that people could change, but they can’t. You just say you will, promise that your past doesn’t define you, that your friends and family don’t make you who you are— swear to god that you don’t need to live as a victim to live a sane life. Yet we keep asking for well-done eggs and lord knows that no one is truly done well.

**Author's Note:**

> Any commentary is super appreciated, love ya all


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